Today’s biggest news comes from Apple, who has just announced that they are working on a way to bring businesses to iMessage. The new product is currently called ‘Business Chat’ and we can’t wait to see the details with their announcement at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference today. We’ll be keeping an eye out and including all updates in our latest version of Messaging Weekly.

Apple is working on a way to bring businesses to the iMessage platform, in order to answer customer questions, offer customer service and even perform transactions. Though not announced at WWDC, a new page on Apple’s Developer site briefly details this new service, dubbed “Business Chat,” which will be able to operate across platforms, including iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

Dublin-based Money messaging app Plynk has raised €25 million (£21.7 million) from a Swiss investment trust, in what it claims is the biggest ever "Series A" investment for an Irish startup. Plynk says in a release that it is building an app which links to people's Facebook accounts and then lets them send money to friends through messages with no fees.

Slack's AI chief explains how it knows what users want to know before they even think to ask. In the same way that Google uses extensive user data to rank search results, Slack is now applying AI-like smarts when users look for information within it. Effectively Slack is watching its users, learning how they do their job and knows what users want to know before they even think to ask.

Automat has raised $8.3 million to grow its conversational marketing operation. In a round led by You & Mr, Jones, the majority of the investment will be focused on expanding the company’s engineering, research, and product teams.

Toronto-based Zoom.ai has just raised a $2.1 million seed round for its automated assistant. Zoom.ai’s chatbot is targeted to enterprise, and automates menial tasks like meeting scheduling, flight searches, internal document searches, and reminders. A growing part of the business is also its information retrieval capabilities; Zoom.ai can build an internal FAQ with common questions posed to HR and IT staff, and generate documents like NDAs based on templates.

Here are the five most popular bots this past week, as they appear on Botlist: - HeyTaco!: With HeyTaco! you’ll see more people collaborating, recognizing each other, and team celebrations.- Food Makers: You can search for a restaurant in your area or try a recipe or simply read our stories about food & innovation.- Rubio.io: Everything you need to automate your Facebook page.- Youtube DJ: A free online DJ console.- Anthbot: Anthbot has a set of entertainment commands and useful commands to facilitate member interaction on your server.